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Peter Schiff’s predictions about Obama’s economy

Peter Schiff needs a blag. Well, he has one, sort of; he publishes weekly commentaries at his website. I can’t link to any of them, though, because they don’t have URLs of their own. In his most recent one, “The Reagan Counterrevolution,” he compares the relatively government-reducing ideology that won Reagan the White House (and which he largely ignored and the Republicans continued to ignore for 20 years) to Obama’s openly socialist, Keynesian, micromanaging, and State-glorifying ideology. In his short commentary he doesn’t expend any space on the fact that the neocon wing of the Republocrat Party has policies identical to those of the liberal wing, but his focus is on what’s to come, and the liberal Republocrats are the ones who will bring it to us, good and hard:

The President-elect has promised to cage the destructive forces of capitalism, impose more regulation, raise marginal tax rates, increase government spending, and restore prosperity by redistributing wealth from those who earned it to those considered to be more deserving. Like most of his generation, Obama believes that economic growth results from consumer spending, primarily from the middle class. Any policy that keeps the consumers headed to the mall will be promoted.
[...]
Reagan looked to unleash the pent-up free market forces that had been smothered by a generation of Great Society reforms and uninterrupted Democratic control of Congress. Today, the public is looking for the Obama Administration to create the growth that the free market has apparently destroyed. The hope that our economy will grow as a result of government spending and micro-management is the most seminal shift in political philosophy since the New Deal.
[...]
What nearly all politicians on both sides of the aisle fail to understand is that the current contraction and credit crunch is necessary to restore order to an economy that is horribly out of balance. Years of misguided fiscal and monetary policy and market-distorting regulations have resulted in reckless borrowing and spending on Main Street, pervasive gambling on Wall Street, and rampant fraud and corruption at every intersection. America’s borrow and spend economy, and the bloated service sector that evolved around it, must be allowed to topple, so that a more sustainable economy grounded in savings and production can rise in its place. Any government efforts to delay the adjustment and spare us the pain will backfire, turning this recession into an inflationary depression.

Of broader concern however is the sharp turn in ideology, and what it means for the future of our nation. If this is a permanent shift, then America will lose any resemblance to the economic titan it was in the 20th Century. Our standard of living will decline sharply, our economy will be ravaged by inflation, tens of millions will be unemployed, more individual liberties will be surrendered, and rugged individualism will be supplanted by the nanny state. In short, Latin America may extend north to the Canadian border.

There’s nothing in there that a lot of other free-marketeers haven’t said numerous times, but it was blag-worthy prognostication to me.

Posted in Economics, Obama predictions